Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

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by Theodor Adorno,

Edited by Rolf Tiedemann,

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Stanford University Press

Due/Published June 2001, 250 pages, paper

ISBN 0804744262

New in paper (F01)

Kant is a pivotal thinker in Adorno's intellectual world. Although he wrote monographs on Hegel, Husserl, and Kierkegaard, the closest Adorno came to an extended discussion of Kant are two lecture courses, one concentrating on the Critique of Pure Reason and the other on the Critique of Practical Reason. This new volume by Adorno comprises his lectures on the former.

Adorno attempts to make Kant's thought comprehensible to students by focusing on what he regards as problematic aspects of Kant's philosophy. Adorno examines Kant's dualism and what he calls the Kantian "block": the contradictions arising from Kant's resistance to the idealism that his successors--Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel--saw as the inevitable outcome of his ideas. These lectures also provide an accessible introduction to and rationale for Adorno's own philosophy as expounded in Negative Dialectics and his other major writings. Adorno's view of Kant forms an integral part of his own philosophy, since he argues that the way out of the Kantian contradictions is to show the necessity of the dialectical thinking that Kant himself spurned. This in turn enables Adorno to criticize Anglo-Saxon scientistic or positivist thought, as well as the philosophy of existentialism.

Review

The good fortune readers have had in the recent publication of Adorno's lectures is in stark contrast to the irritation the lecturer himself would have felt. Adorno viewed his lecture courses as opportunities to think through issues, giving them a free-flowing and even improvisatory character. They were not, in short, to be understood as finished works. At times his lack of systematic argumentation might make it difficult for the reader to follow along, but ultimately the style affords unique insights into Adorno's own thinking on a range of philosophical issues. The lectures on Kant are especially important because they give us Adorno's thoughts on a philosopher who was central to his own work but on whom he did not write extensively. Thus Adorno's discussion of Kant's epistemology gives us not only a fascinating critique of Kant's thought, but also an exploration of issues important to his own philosophy. In particular Adorno argues that the contradictions and problems in Kant's thought can be, in a sense, solved through dialectical thinking. This, in turn, allows Adorno to expand upon his own conception of negative dialectics, as well as to criticize Anglo-Saxon positivist thought and existential philosophy.

For other recently published titles by and about Theodor Adorno and Immanuel Kant.